


love with no place to rest (never love an anchor)

by violaceum_vitellina_viridis



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Abandonment, Attachment Issues, Based on a song, Character Study, Child Abandonment, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Pregnancy, The Inherent Tragedy of Witchers, Unplanned Pregnancy, Vignette, post-partum depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27486943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violaceum_vitellina_viridis/pseuds/violaceum_vitellina_viridis
Summary: “It’s notpossible.It cannot be. I am a sorceress of Aretuza. Theytook thatfrom me.”
Comments: 23
Kudos: 82





	love with no place to rest (never love an anchor)

**Author's Note:**

> if you'd really like to know exactly what headspace i was in to write this, pull up Never Love An Anchor by The Crane Wives and read the lyrics, then listen to it on repeat while reading this like i did while writing it. 
> 
> i am wholesale blaming this on Em ([Emamel](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/Emamel/profile)), because without them i wouldn't have spent like a week thinking entirely too deeply about the lyrics, "i am selfish, i am broken, i am cruel; i am all the things they might have said to you," and hurting my own damn feelings.

She knows, with a startling, sickening clarity, the moment she becomes pregnant. The feeling of new life is unmistakable.

But she also knows that because life is unmistakable, death is, too; just as Imbaelk turns to Birke, she experiences the same bone-deep, stomach turning certainty that the babe’s father is dead.

* * *

Despite her surety, she has to check.

And even then, she’s terrified.

“It’s not _possible,_ ” she shouts. She’s too loud, too much, _desperate_ in a way she hasn’t been in years, in _decades._ Since she was a child, orphaned and alone with blood on her hands and no one to blame for her misfortune but herself. “It cannot be. I am a sorceress of Aretuza. They _took that_ from me.” They did. They had to. And she had given it willingly, knowingly, the image of her mother burned into her mind exactly like the fire that took her life. “I gave it up, for….”

For nothing. For chaos, for a Brotherhood more like a jury, for _nothing._ A heritage of grief and of running away.

“Clearly, they did not, Visenna,” Nenneke says coolly, wiping her hands clean. When she looks up, there’s softness in her eyes, the softness of a mother. A _mother._ Visenna shudders. “You are pregnant, and whether you thank or curse the Gods for it, it remains the truth.”

Visenna buries her face in her hands. “What am I to do?” she asks. “Karin is dead. And I….”

“You have a week, maybe two, to make a decision. We may be able to fix this, Visenna, but there is only so much I am capable of. Nature will takes its own course unless dug out quickly and at the roots.”

Nenneke leaves her to shake and sob, nothing more than a passing brush of a warm, weathered hand on Visenna’s shoulder. She’s left alone with her thoughts, her grief and rage, and the life she can feel growing inside her like an ember.

* * *

He’s born early, small and pink and squalling. His hair is a blood-red shock against the white of the temple room, an exact match to Visenna’s.

She collapses to the bed when he’s taken away, his screams echoing around her like ghosts, and she does not cry.

One of Nenneke’s apprentices sets him on her chest sometime later, his skin sticky and too warm, hair tickling, and leaves them be.

She helps him latch, but cannot bear to touch him any further.

She cries.

* * *

Visenna tries.

She tries so hard, but every time Geralt cries – every time he wakes in the night, eyes wide and full of tears – all she can see, all she can hear, is her siblings. Her siblings, also red-haired and green-eyed, just like her, just like Geralt, who all died too young because she couldn’t save them.

Because she couldn’t control herself.

“You have to hold him, Visenna,” Heledd scolds her, sharp and stern in the early morning light, her own toddler on her hip and a basket of bread over the other arm. “He’s just a babe. They need the touch.”

But Geralt cries when she holds him, and he cries when she does not, and she cannot stand the sound. Cannot stand it’s familiarity, the way it rings like echoes of the past come to haunt her again, smoke and screams and failure, failure, failure.

* * *

Geralt is an unsettling child.

He inherited the somber nature of his father. Even before he can speak, his thoughts are like a deep river – relatively calm on the surface, meandering, but rushing beneath, enough to sweep someone away. Despite that, he’s quiet, solemn, watching more than he does anything else. His gaze, vivid and almost knowing, even at the tender age of three, makes Visenna’s hair stand on end.

No matter how much she tries not to think about it, he feels like a predator.

He still cries when she tries to hold him, but he clings tightly when she tries to pull away, too.

* * *

She meets Vesemir for the first time on a chilly spring afternoon.

He would be a handsome man, if he weren’t a Witcher; all the same, he’s still handsome in a roguish, dangerous way. She notices him trading pelts for rations at the market first, and later watches him trade coin for information.

The thought comes to her unbidden, and suddenly, she’s desperate like she hasn’t been since that day in the Temple. _Nature will takes its own course unless dug out quickly and at the roots._ It’s twisted, sickening and rotten that she would consider it, but –

She sees Geralt, just across the square, sitting by himself and staring into the distance. By himself, and no one brave enough to approach him, not even the half-tamed birds that might have interest in the bread he’s holding in his lap. As if sensing her looking, he turns and finds her eyes unerringly. Her hair stands on end and a shiver rakes down her spine.

Vesemir seems shocked when she asks his name, even more shocked when she calls him Master.

“Please,” she pleads, hands twisting in her apron. “Please, I beg you.”

He looks to Geralt, still sitting by himself in the square, and he looks torn. But all the same, he agrees.

* * *

Vesemir swings Geralt up into his arms, heedless of the boy’s crying, and watches his mother ride away. The late afternoon sun catches the dust and turns it gold.

“Ma,” Geralt sobs, quietly, pudgy little fingers digging viciously into Vesemir’s neck. “Ma.”

He wonders what kind of blood Visenna had on her hands, to beg a Witcher to take her son. Wonders, too, if she really knows what she’s done, what fate she’s bound her child to before he’s even old enough to understand that she’s abandoned him.

Of course, he could take Geralt to an orphanage.

But the boy is strong, even as weak as he seems right now, crying for his mother in the arms of a stranger, and Vesemir knows how rarely Witchers are given strong children.

“It’s alright,” he murmurs, pushing tangled red curls away from Geralt’s wet face. “It’s alright, Geralt.”

It’s a comfortable lie, but a lie all the same, one Vesemir has told tens of hundreds of times. One he’ll tell again and again, a hundred thousand more times, before the world sees fit to snuff him out.

But lie or not, Geralt calms.

“Ma,” he whispers one last time, and Vesemir hopes, for his sake, that the sands of time will take this moment away from him.

If time does not, the Trials certainly will.

**Author's Note:**

> for an extra splash of pain, have a headcanon:
> 
> when geralt asked visenna if she knew what they did to young witchers to give them the cat eyes, the answer was that she didn't.


End file.
